The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is a book that I picked up because of the uprising in Baltimore around Freddy Gray and a desire to understand the circumstances in Baltimore that would give rise to that riot.  I am listening to the audio version narrated by Karen Chilton.

Started: 10/23/2017

Completed: 11/15/2017

Recommended By:  Nobody

Recommendation: Highly recommended

Review:

What a great book.  The statistics are simply shocking.  There is no excuse and Ms. Alexander makes a really compelling case.  All Americans have to read this book.  White Americans should be ashamed.  Black Americans are likely to simply feel validated.

Post-PostModernism, Jeffrey T. Nealon

Post-PostModernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism by Jeffrey T. Nealon is a book I picked up because the Hedgehog Review had a whole issue devoted to Post-PostModernism and I needed some sort of background before the magazine arrived.

Started:  5/21/2017

Completed: 11/5/2017 (stopped reading)

Recommendation: Not recommended--run away.

Recommended By:  Google web search on the topic, this seems to be the current survey text

Words and phrases for which I sought help:

chiasmus -- an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases

infelicitous -- inappropriate or awkward; not well said

Review:

Simply unending double speak.  6 months wasted on this book.  Here is the sentence that ended it:  "However incredibly productive and oppositional this deconstructive insight has proven to be over the years, Negri points out that our contemporary masters (corporations, media conglomerates, spin doctors, finance capitalists, port-Fordist outsourcers of all kinds) no longer dream of a kind of exclusionary, binary totalization and don't achieve their hegemonic effects primarily through a normatively repressive logocentrism."  If you can make sense of that, then you should read this book.  Otherwise, run away.